To live more musically

In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism, and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.

- Vincent Van Gogh

I have picked up Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead once again. I think this might be my fourth time. I love this book far more than the label “great read” might signify. For me, reaching into this particular offering of Waugh’s is a visceral experience. I do not just seem to read it, but to feel it.

At my first reading, I was a young twenty-something. My roommate had handed a beautiful leather volume to me one evening. Anything seemed a lot more attractive than the Descartes I was reading at that moment, so I took her tempting leather book, and I gave the first chapter a whirl. Alas, unfortunate Monsignor Descartes slipped to the floor and was completely forgotten under the bed until morning.

I stayed up half that night immersed. I brought Mr. Waugh to lunch with me and read him between classes. I read deep into that Friday night when I could have gone out for a drink with friends, and lo, in the wee hours of the morning I found myself in a place quite familiar to all those who have been to Brideshead before — Julia at the fountain. I was thoroughly unprepared. In the space of two slim pages of the written word, Waugh had me crying uncontrollably and from the deep places. I don’t know why. My returning roommate heard me and opened the door with a questioning alarm. All I could say was “Julia…” And she replied quite softly, “At the fountain?” I nodded yes. She slowly closed the door. This was between Waugh and me. My roommate was a wise one. She’d been there before.

Charles and Julia at the fountain

I have read this book again over the years. I own a leather bound copy of my own now, and it is quite worthy of its leather binding. I find something new each time I read. It always, always reaches down within the deep places and stirs up things I never knew were there. It’s like Waugh is calling to my deeps and asking urgently if I feel it too. I always call back with an emphatic yes!

This year was different, however. I did read it once again, but I found myself in a somewhat uncharted territory. The pages were pristine here in Book I, Chapter 8. There were no pencil marks lurking in the pages of the margins — those urgent little messages from my past self to nota bene! These were pages I simply must have read with a benign eye in order to carry myself over to Book II. I never tarried here, it seems. So, once again, I was unprepared for the deluge that was about to ensue. I had come to expect it of Mr. Waugh, this element of surprise.

Charles has gone in search of the elusive Sebastian in the vain attempt to bring him home to his mother who is dying. Charles discovers him in Morocco, gravely ill himself, in a crowded hospital teeming with noise but gentled by the sweetness of Franciscan brothers running to and fro. A busy French doctor stops Charles in the hall and informs him in a voice as crisp as his starched white coat that Sebastian is in no way fit to travel. He has the grippe and the lungs are affected. He is very weak, but that was to be expected as he is a raging alcoholic and thus has no resistance. Then he moves on, “dispassionately, almost brutally, with the relish men of science sometimes have for limiting themselves to inessentials, for pruning back their work to the point of sterility.” He places Sebastian in a no nonsense nutshell as though flatly asserting that facts is facts. He isn’t wrong. Charles knows all these things and nods in a worldly understanding.

Sebastian in Morocco

Then enters one who, “lives more musically.” Charles describes a, “barefooted brother in whose charge he put me, the man of no scientific pretensions who did the dirty jobs of the ward,” who had, as Charles succinctly puts it, “a different story.”

He describes Sebastian as being so patient and kind. Not like a young man at all. “He lies there and never complains — and there is much to complain of.” He tells Charles that Sebastian is taking care of a poor German boy with a foot that will not heal, and who has secondary syphilis. Sebastian found him starving in Tangier, took him in and gave him a home. He proclaims Sebastian a real Samaritan.

This poor, little, overworked monk knows the back story, has eyes for the eternal beyond the alcoholism, the wasted flesh, the obvious ruination of a life that had been blessed with every opportunity and had squandered it.

What the monk sees is the utter success of suffering. He sees a man who has faced the demons within himself and fallen into the hands of the poor, loving, suffering Christ thereby. He, in turn, becomes Christ to someone more unfortunate than even himself. The little monk assumes that Charles can see this quite plainly, as holy people have a way of assuming. Charles does not. He says to himself in complete, cynical, self-assurance, “Poor simple monk, I thought, poor booby.” And you think it ends there, Charles steeped in unsurprising cynicism. It does not. Waugh gently lays down the bombshell that will one day explode the hardening shell around the heart of Charles. We hear the ghostly future Charles crying in the mouth of the present cynic on the page. “God forgive me!” And once again, with those three words I was — undone.

Had I too grown unable to see the music behind the suffering world? Did I protect my heart with cynicism and obvious facts that could not be denied? Did I call joyful, saintly folk “boobies” in my heart for being so unable to see that they were being duped by the wiles of evil; still hoping in a world that obviously did not warrant hope. God forgive me, I echoed Charles, and let the book drop in my lap. I had become a cynic.

Cynicism is tricky. I think it is most satisfying to dabble in it because it’s usually not wrong. It sees situations and other people “exactly the way they are.” The more astute the cynic is at intuitively reading people, the more satisfying it becomes. It’s why hearing and indulging in sarcasm can be so delicious sometimes. Un-deluded certitude can be a tasty dish, to be sure.

There is a sense of control to the cynic, predicting all these moves. It’s a tempting thing, control. It makes our little world safe, but there is a tradeoff. The cynic will have his coveted truth but he pays for it dearly in despair. That our fellow humans will never be anything but woefully and ridiculously predictable in all their foibles. That they will most likely hurt us, lie to us, or perhaps even betray us for twenty pieces of silver — that is an undeniable truth. That they will always and ever be so with no possibility of change — that is despair. Cynicism is heady and attractive. It keeps us from playing the naive fool. It is our weapon against an unpredictably fallen world. It is too hard to hear the Divine music within the sin, the suffering, the betrayals and so we run like the cowards are. We run for cynicism and pretend to let it fight our battles for us. But it can never win. We must face the music to win.

I find it a common and odd phenomenon in our present world that if someone is seeking beauty or truth and is determined to dwell there in hope of the good and to speak only what is true, what is noble, what is right, pure, lovely, and admirable — they are considered naive and rather childish. Deep, “grown-up” thinkers are somehow equated with cynicism, sarcasm, and contempt. They are those who REALLY know what's what in the world. The ones who live without all these optimistic delusions.

In the end, though, cynicism is the worst kind of cowardice. It has not truly faced the REAL darkness, or else it could not be so glib. It's the positive thinkers who are the courageous. Not true that they are unintelligent or naive. Perhaps they have seen deep darkness, experienced it in their lives, maybe seen it in friends or even in their own children, and have refused to let the darkness win; to be determined to at least keep it at bay with a desire to see God always and everywhere, even in, "distressing disguise." Perhaps they seek the beauty and goodness so persistently because they know full well the terror of the darkness. Perhaps it almost overcame them once and they will not let that happen again. We should not condescend to them, never talk down to them like they are silly children, nor pat them on the head and dismiss them as quaint. They are singing in the dark not because they are clueless, but because someone might find their way out of the darkness by following their voice. They live as man was created to live — musically.

In our lesser moments, when we somehow have despondently dropped the old music to the floor of our souls and perhaps see nothing coherent in the events we have experienced, or the people who have come in and out of our lives — we know not why. Everything of joy and great promise — perhaps a friendship we wanted so much to happen, or a success that began to depreciate as soon as it began, or a disappointment in a Church that has given us such worry and angst when stability and consolation were called for.

We sit in the heavy silence of it all and feel very much forgotten and lost to meaning. And we may sigh and quote Robert Frost who laments that, “nothing gold can stay” — and feel satisfaction that we will not be fooled by hope anymore. We know the score now. Anger may set in that we were such fools to be optimistic. We may begin to harden — to calcify. To take matters into our own hands. To ignore the beauty and the goodness of the music we once knew. To settle on cynicism which seems so much stronger and more satisfying than hope right now. To proclaim the saints boobies for believing, for hoping, for singing in the dark.

We must pray ourselves into the redemption of Charles’s words, “God forgive me!” We must let cynicism fall and face the dangers of loving a world that once knew the voice of a singing God but has lost hope of hearing it again. We must rise and sing the song. We must live musically. The love of Christ compels us.

It is Love that clothes the naked predictability of others. It is Love that sees them in the context of the New Man they are now — the unpredictable man who might suddenly flash with good deeds, “like shining from shook foil,” at any moment. The person who is filled with the possibilities of grace. Love sees the mystery of what a soul now could be at any moment and not what they are.

Love gives the cynic hope. Hope that others in the world are not as woefully predictable as he thought and therefore always brimming with the dangerous prospect of a surprising human lyricism playing underneath.

Let this be the end of cynicism, skepticism, and humbug. Let us dare to live more musically. I hear Mr. Waugh calling urgently to me in the deep places he has led me: do you feel it? Do you understand? I reply with three quiet words, “God forgive me!” And they seem to me like the beginning of a beautiful song.